An Autodidact's Bible, #7

Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Introduction and Chapter 1a

This is the seventh installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.

Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6

If your email client chokes on this post, find the whole thing at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

Now that we’ve finished our survey of the different types of knowledge, let’s move on to a look at the techniques you’ll want to have at hand for locating and acquiring knowledge…

Part 2: The Techniques

Introduction
Your Foundation: The Courage of the Journey

In order to undertake this journey, you will need something that’s not easily given:

Courage.

Fear, in one guise or another, is the bane of any venture into the unknown—and that, after all, is what learning is, by definition. To learn is to admit, up front, “I am inadequate.” You must be, if you don’t know something or can’t do something that you wish you did or could. But to feel inadequate is to feel a species of the most painful of all sensations that a sentient being can feel: humiliation.

Awful word, isn’t it? Just hearing it can pluck those little strings of terror deep down in your gut.

Humiliation comes in all flavors from “Well, this is a little embarrassing, and I’m blushing, too” through “This makes me feel stupid” through “God, I am so disgusting” to “I think I’d like to curl up and die now.”

To be humiliated is to be brought low in the eyes of an observer, whether that observer is a friend, lover, spouse, mentor, idol, social competitor, enemy, or stranger. You are induced to feel their disapproval, disapprobation, and/or disgust for you. It can also happen in your own eyes, and this is the hardest of all, because, for most of us, our self-image is what we use as a basis to form our model for the esteem that others hold us in.

Humiliation, in other words, is the emotional response to exactly what the word means in a lexical sense:

To be humbled.

The beginning of wisdom, the beginning of learning, the necessary precursor for knowledge is the statement “I do not know.” This statement comes in many forms, but all of them are an acknowledgment of a lack on your own part. If you can’t or won’t say that, then your autodidactic journey will be over before it starts—you will either quit, or you will quickly find refuge in an ideology that provides a fully systematized view of the world with all the answers you could want. It may require your fealty, but it will reward that fealty with the pride of belonging to a righteous cause, of being on the side that has all the answers. It’s the pride of the toady, but if humiliation and loss are the worst feelings in the world, who wouldn’t trade them away for the pride of being a middle-manager or valued footsoldier or well-loved slave?

This isn’t a joke—the many such movements that have burned the world throughout history suggest that the answer is “damn few.”

Courage is not a lack of fear. It’s not a lack of humiliation. It is the determination to continue in the face of fear and humiliation. It is what makes learning possible when curiosity runs into emotional or mental blocks, or grows tired, or wears thin. Outfitting yourself for this journey means bucking up and facing forward, knowing that you will run into things that change the way you understand the world, and understand yourself. Things that will slay your dearest values and that will require you to bury some greatly prized ideas, values, gods, and heroes, and perhaps resurrect others along the way. We all face some form of this in the process of growing up—this journey simply adds an endless coda to the end of that process. You will repeat, over and over, the process of becoming in every new arena you enter, and at every new level of understanding you achieve even in your specialties.

Buddhism has an aphorism that attacks this problem starkly:

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.¹

In other words, those things we hold most dear (especially those things we fancy part of our identity, such as fandoms, religious ideas, ideological precepts, etc.) are those things most likely to blind us. They are those things most likely to arouse fear and defensiveness, because their very sacredness makes them vectors for conceit and self-righteousness, as well as opportunities for self-abasement and toadyism. These are the things about which it is most difficult to accept and embrace the humiliation of learning—and, not coincidentally, these are the places where that acceptance is the most important if we are to learn in ways that are meaningful and that accord with the discipline of reality.

We all have to start somewhere, and it’s fair to assume that you’re starting off trapped in a glass box made up of a lot of distortions and false walls—we all do—and that’s gonna make the first few steps tricky, because it interferes with the invisible foundation of the autodidactic method:

Information triage.

How do you know what to pay attention to​? How can you tell what nifty (or off-putting) new idea might be worth your time? How can you quickly spot blind alleys?

How do you sort the relevant from the irrelevant?

This is the first-stage filter. If something doesn’t register to you as relevant you can’t then learn about it, evaluate it, decide whether it is true or false, useless or useful, or find a place in your knowledge web to hang it. And, when you’re starting out, that filter is reflexive. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. In all likelihood, your filter is malformed because that filter is integral to your glass box, which itself is malformed. It is, you’ll recall, designed to keep you alive by minimizing your disruptive impulses.

This part of the book is replete with tools for learning and thinking, many of which can be turned toward the task of information triage. Some of these I point out, others I do not. Stay sharp!

But to start off with, try this on for size.

If you find yourself persistently uninterested in something, it is worth examining why. Sometimes uninterest is the result of ignorance (you have no convenient place in your knowledge web to plug a thing into), sometimes it’s a result of genuine predilection (your personality isn’t easily tasked to doing a particular kind of research, task, or practice), but, often, uninterest can be a manifestation of mental dysfunction. It’s a protective layer to buffer you from feelings of fear, inadequacy, and humiliation bubbling beneath the surface. Writers face this all the time—we call it “writer’s block,” but it’s just feelings of inadequacy getting in the way of flow—which is why successful writers are often simply the ones with enough persistence to stick around and keep writing. The bar of inadequacy is so high that most aspiring authors never muster the persistence to clear it.

So, your first new tool for information triage is this:

If something bores you, especially if it bores you aggressively, assume it’s relevant in a potentially worldview-disturbing way.

It won’t always work, but it’s one tool of dozens that, by the end of the book, you’ll have hanging from your toolbelt. Information triage, learning, research, mentor-hunting, memory, and thinking are all pieces of the autodidact’s puzzle. They are the mountaineering kit, if you will, that will allow us to contend with Pope’s Alps.

So let’s get on with it.

Chapter 1
Outfitting Yourself: The Basics

As you can see by our tour of Pope’s Alps in the previous chapter, knowledge is sprawling and multivariate, not monolithic. Every subject you expose yourself to will eventually lead you through numerous valleys and see you mapping the hidden trails and tunnels between them. This means that any time you learn enough, or discover enough, your internal map of the shape of the world is going to change—usually subtly, sometimes radically.

These changes may not sit well with you. After all, our intuition would have us believe that the world is supposed to function in a straightforward and orderly fashion. However, just as happens when you start to add additional people to a circle of friends, with every new relationship between one part of the universe and another, the potential for mischief and chaos multiplies. Your intuitive view of the world will, uncomfortably, erode in the face of this complexity.

This erosion is a good thing; the universe is unsettlingly big and complex, which is why most people prefer to live in smaller pretend universes of their own design.² If you’re learning any subject deeply enough, it should eventually undermine your belief in something you feel is important or foundational to your worldview, ethical system, tribal identity, or self-image.

Fortunately, like all weapons, what knowledge costs you in terms of safety it returns to you in terms of power. The connections you will discover between areas of knowledge (and pieces of the universe) will allow you to navigate the world more effectively—and, perhaps more importantly, it frees you from the burden of that most useless piece of advice we all got drummed into us as we grew up:

“Follow your passion.”

Useless?

Yes. And stupid.

Your passions are not inborn. They are not the thing that “defines” you. They’re not something you “identify” with. Oh, to be sure, your inclinations certainly help shape who you are, but those interests that you’ve clung to and used to carve out a small area of comfort and competence?³

They are only a toe-hold. A small point at which your inner self intersects with the wider world.

Your inner drives get channeled through those small points of connection, and the fewer you have, the more desperately important to your sense of self they will seem.

But it is your drives, not your interests, that are you. If you approach learning in a fashion that integrates the world, and ties every field of study and bit of knowledge to every other, you can develop an interest in—or passion for—almost anything. By opening your mind to the structure of reality, you don’t just open the world to your investigation, you open your enthusiasm to the world.

Sound crazy?

Until the early 20^th century, almost everyone lived on a farm. The things you and I do every day—surfing the internet, driving a car, talking to friends who aren’t in the same room, commuting, going to schools, working in an office—either didn’t exist or were so rare as to not be on most people’s mental map. Did any of those people have a passion for video games?

Of course not.

Similarly, how many people do you know today who have a passion for animal husbandry or blacksmithing?

Not many, I’d wager.

But just a few generations back, such passions were common.

Why?

Because a century ago, husbandry and smithing were part of every day life, so more people came into contact with those things. Thus, more people had the opportunity for their drives to connect with the wider world through the portal of a forge, or a cattle herd, and in that connection a passion was born.

Your passions are not in-born. They’re not automatic. They are the result of cultivation and caprice. The more you learn, and the better you are at it, the more passions you will develop, and the richer your life will be.

This part of the book is about the tools you use to do that.